Further Future Is the Festival Silicon Valley Deserves

Imagine a Burning Man without the smells or the dust. Then add luxury amenities and a world-class music lineup. Sounds pretty good, right? Yeah. That’s why tech titans and tastemakers gathered on the Moapa Indian Reservation last weekend and took a bunch of drugs together.

Eric Schmidt is worried about how much we use our phones. The chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which happens to make Android, which happens to be the most popular phone in the world, is speaking on the Visionary Speaker stage at the Further Future festival in the desert outside Las Vegas. He’s sitting before a glittering, feathered crowd of tech bros, women in festival bikinis, entrepreneurs, burners, druggies, futurists, and journalists. He’s wearing a steampunk top hat with a vest made from mirror shards.

“Ninety-seven percent of you sleep with the phone next to the bed plugged in,” he proclaims as small drones buzz overhead. “The three percent that don’t are probably happier. The average person touches their phone 1,500 times a week. It’s replaced the addiction that people had 50 years ago with the cigarette.”

It’s a nice, small contradiction, hearing the smartphone overlord cop to this. But, as with many of the contradictions at the festival’s second iteration, no one seems to mind, even as bass from an adjacent DJ stage thumps at a level or two just below the conversation. All attention is on Schmidt, a 61-year-old tech CEO who presently looks like a Bizarro World robber baron.

On its website, which is a good website, Further Future explains that it intends to establish “a modern means of social movement and cultural change.” They’re aiming to own a piece of the same thing the TED circuit already has: a globally influential brand in that amorphous space between art and fun and capitalism. Call it a “lifestyle” brand.

The festival offers music, tech speakers, spa treatments, Michelin-level food, yoga, and, if you know where to look, an overflowing cornucopia of drugs. All of it carefully selected in order to set up the opportunity for you to have a transformational experience. And all you have to do is pay up: Anywhere from $250—if you’re not planning on sleeping or eating—to multiple thousands of dollars if you get the technocrat package.

Speaking of technocrats, the man of the hour is holding forth on self-driving cars, drones, and immigration reform when a strange thing happens. Loïc Le Meur, who co-hosts the speaker series and is wearing a knee-length fur coat and sunglasses with three round lenses (one for his third eye), asks Schmidt to confirm that it was his birthday three days ago. Indeed it was. So the predominantly white, affluent, and scantily dressed crowd begins to sing, serenading one of the most powerful technologists in the world with an earnest rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Early in the festival, before Schmidt takes the stage, I meet a Google employee wearing goggles and a keffiyeh. “My name is Matt Werner,” he says, “and I’m writing a musical about Burning Man.” I immediately turn on my recorder to catch his elevator pitch.

“It’s about a young techie from Silicon Valley named Joe. He’s a 25-year-old white guy who goes to Burning Man to network with Silicon Valley elites: Elon Musk, the Google co-founders. But then, of course, he finds out the vibe is way different. It’s not like a startup demo space. Will he change on his return to Silicon Valley, or will he remain the same startup douchebag that he was going in?”

Then I turn my recorder off, and Matt wanders off into the crowd.

Later that night, I'm sitting atop a white pillow on the floor of the dinner tent, a softly illuminated canopy, leaning against a long, low table loaded with small plates of foie gras and glasses left over from the last course of the beer pairing. To my right is Carter Cleveland, the founder of Artsy—a platform for art discovery and commerce—who counts himself among the select few who attended Further Future’s inaugural festival last year. The dinner, cooked by Michael Bryant of The Larchmont in L.A., cost $150 per person.

Across from me are two veteran burners, Jenn and Konrad, a very handsome couple who tell me how re-entering the “Default World”—everyday life for you and me—after Burning Man is so jarring it makes them cry. Every year they must budget time after the burn for decompression. They both work in tech.

I’d heard through the New York–media grapevine that someone at Further Future wasn’t happy with the GQ.com post I put up a few days prior, which included the words “Bougie Burning Man” in the title. I almost felt bad, because the festival and its publicity team have been nothing but accommodating to me and my photographer. But, well, isn’t that exactly what this is? I ask my new burner friends. Of course, they say happily. It’s BM lite.

We eat smoked pork-belly pastrami and Moroccan spiced lamb shoulder from shared plates. It’s pretty fucking good. When the chef comes out before the final course, people call for a speech. Instead, he breaks into song, leading the hundred-odd diners sitting on the floor through “Tomorrow” from Annie.

Eric Schmidt is sitting one table over when he stands in the middle of the room and pulls out his shirt tail to clean his glasses before tucking back in and sitting down again. I promise to meet up later with Jenn and Konrad in front of the Robot Heart bus. Then I eat a tab of acid and wander out into the sandy, laser-cut darkness.

The Robot Heart venue, the spiritual center of the festival, is a battered old school bus with an elaborate, oversize, and incredibly powerful speaker system welded onto it. On top is a metal cage in the shape of a heart with LEDs woven through its bars. The sound system faces out into the desert and is flanked on either side by shipping containers that have been converted into boutique-y bars—one serving sake, the other serving premixed cocktails. People have stacked wooden pallets atop the containers as high as possible and watch the scene below from treacherous heights.

But that’s the ethos of Robot Heart, which started as a camp at Burning Man and has a reputation for throwing the best parties in Black Rock City: Take as many drugs as you can handle, blast the music as loud as possible, dangle yourself as precariously as you dare, and then dance until long after the sun comes up.

Wandering around the polychromatic bedlam, I can’t always tell who’s a braveheart burner type that really belongs here and who is, like me, a media parasite glomming on to something shiny and new.

And then I find Champagne.

I’d met Champagne the first night, and we’d barely had a chance to hang out before my night ended in a sleep bag on a small, semi-inflated air mattress in my space pod. Champagne has a face of concentrated joy, his smile not unlike Big Bad Wolf’s in Disney’s 1922 Little Red Riding Hood: lips and eyes wet and ravenous.

“Isn’t this fucking amazing?” he says ecstatically over the thump.

I nod unconvincingly. We talk for a while. He asks if I want a massage. Normally, I don’t take massages from strangers without paying them, especially if they’re named after alcoholic beverages. But I actually really need one, having logged a decent amount of travel to get here and only having slept a few hours on the desert floor. He starts working on my shoulders, and tells me to take the deepest breath I can manage. I realize that I haven’t really breathed in some time. The oxygen rush, combined with the release of whatever toxins I’d been storing in my shoulders, is nearly overwhelming. With two iron-like fingers, he pierces whatever protective tension I’ve built up across my neck and pins down the underlying accumulated stress. Phosphenes pop at the corners of my vision like old-fashioned flash bulbs, and I’m not sure whether the acid is doing that or if Champagne is actually a world-class massage therapist. Just before my eyes well up from the pain, he gives me the affirmative “massage over” pat on the shoulder.

I thank him. He says enthusiastically that men are too “homosexualphobic,” a word he might be mispronouncing because he’s high. “Grab on to a dude!” he exclaims with that cartoon-wolf grin. I tell him that I’m rolling on psychedelic drugs, and he looks me in the eye, spreads his arms to include the scene around us, and says, “I’m glad you’re on our page.”

Hours pass. I drink a bottle of sake. The sun comes up. I crush some bitter crumbs of MDMA between my teeth. Before long the heat of the morning grows and becomes oppressive. And eventually I stagger back to the campsite.

It is a struggle to wring any rest out of the hot, sweaty sleeping kiln my tent has become. Shiny space material doesn’t stand a chance against the desert sun.

I wake in a sweat and look at my phone. Only an hour had passed. In a heady, dehydrated daze, I pack my dusty possessions and drag myself over to the staging area to find a shuttle back to Las Vegas. To air conditioning. To the blessed hotel shower. To the application of moisturizer and lip balm. To sleep.

I wake again—this time at midnight—get dressed, and make my way downstairs. It’s surprisingly cool, and the foot traffic is lighter than in the summer months. I drink a tall beer greedily to fight the comedown. I get this idea that it’d be interesting to savor the contrast between the best party I’d been to in a long time and our nation’s most garish string of blocks: the Las Vegas strip—the tragic composure of hookers, the middle-aged men inviting young men into strip clubs, the endless carpeting, the sunburns, the men in too-small Monster-energy-drink shirts, the intoxicated women in heels falling off curbs. All of it. All of the sadness and excess of America.

Maybe it’s the tail edge of the Molly tripping, but I'm overcome with sympathy. For the dad and mom in ankle socks and cross-trainers who might as well be my parents. The wide-eyed foreign tourist is a parallel version of me in Barcelona. The burnout asleep by his panhandling cup. To the people just happy to be here... It occurs to me that the utopian vision of the future rendered by Further Future doesn’t include any of them.

That doesn’t mean the festival can’t change and grow more inclusive. Some attendees were adamant that it would. I'm reminded of the woman who locked eyes with me on the first afternoon, in the middle of the Martian landscape. I asked her what she thought her role was for the weekend. “I’m one of four black people,” she said. “Say hi to me, because you might not see another one for a while. We’re going to work on that. I’m just here to fix shit.”